DOUBLE FOLD | Nicholson Baker | Review by The Spectator

Nicholson Baker is a subtle novelist, with a reputation for tackling themes that others leave alone. How did he get mixed up with this? It began in 1994 when he wrote a memorable New Yorker article on the destruction of library catalogue cards, once the open sesame to all American libraries, but now junked in favour of digital on-line catalogues. With them, he cried, goes all the loving extra information recorded in manuscript on their backs, the tactile pleasure of riffling through them with your hands, the sense of touching what other greater men and women have touched before. The library profession was outraged to find its new clothes thus treated. The San Francisco Public Library was even more outraged when he exposed it for dumping hundreds of thousands of books because - you guessed it - they failed to fit into a new building built to hold them.

In 1999 the British Library, driven to desperation by the government's failure to provide funds for a much-needed new building, decided to dispose of its foreign newspaper holdings, the best in the world. It was particularly rich in American newspapers, the more so since the once rich local holdings had all been abandoned for other substitutes. Unwisely, it did so by advertising them to other newspaper libraries, many of which had already abandoned 'hard copies'. (This was particularly sad, because many had held papers in different editions, often very different; the microfilms are all copies of the same 'master'.) The Library got some institutional takers, but for many there were no bids and it decided to hold an auction of the rest. Baker, now a battle-scarred crusader, launched a last bid to rescue them. The British Library, understandably but wrongly, held him at some distance, but his herculean efforts preserved runs of the New York Times and Herald Tribune and other important papers. Mortgaging all, but with growing support, he has rented a warehouse to keep them in Maine, where cold guarantees the longest life for paper.

The novelist has now become a librarian, and his account of this tragedy and the half-happy denouement he has himself created is, sadly, not fiction, but the truth told with a narrative skill that enlivens an arcane tale of guilt and misery that other pens, indeed, might not have dwelt on. He has built a monument which, if not more permanent than bronze, will last a great deal longer than anyone else gave it credit for.